The next afternoon, we walked from the Castro Hotel to the bus terminal and caught a local bus from Castro to Ancud.
Ancud is the second largest town on Chiloe and sits in a beautiful north facing bay.
When we arrived in Ancud we talked with some young men sitting in a booth at the terminal and asked about seeing the penguins. There was no English spoken, but they eagerly signed us up for a tour the next day and then offered to drive us to our hotel. All they could say was Swartznegger and hasta la vista, baby! We had no idea what we were in for in the morning. We walked around the town and beachfront, checked out a concert in the central park by a youth band and went to the local museum, which had pictures of before and after the 1960 earthquake. This massive earthquake knocked down the local church along with many buildings and the following tsunami took most of the rest of the town. Railroads were abandoned after this event..
According to what we had read, the majority of the residents are a mixture of Indigenous and European ancestry Most people were willing to converse with us in our limited Spanish. Ancud had a Spanish fort, built in the 1770’s and many structures with German architecture.
The police are called the Caribineros de Chile and are federal police. Against Chris’ opinion, I had to get a picture of them. A couple of our guide books suggested offering money to the police if you were in trouble, but local information said NEVER to offer these guys a bribe. Their uniforms certainly are very Germanic and seeing several in dress uniform at once is like being an extra in a World War II movie. Here’s a photo.
Here are a couple of photos at the fort. The first is of one of several turrets and the other is one of the cannons at sundown, about 9:45 P.M. at this latitude.
Click on LOCATION below for map of Ancud
Part 2 to follow
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